Building a case for restorative justice in Tama-Toledo

Building bridges in the wild
(Rural east Marshall Co.)

In my ongoing work for Eastern Mennonite University, I've helped coordinate the technology aspects of the "Real World Restorative Justice" webinar series, and this past spring I taught a 3-week course on restorative justice at Grinnell College. These have helped keep alive my passion for restorative justice.

(For a primer on the field of restorative justice, see here.)

Meanwhile, over the past two years of living in Toledo, Iowa, I've been looking for opportunities to plant seeds, spread the word, and maybe even get some small restorative justice project started. But when it comes to institutional settings where restorative justice is often employed - criminal justice and public schools, for instance - I haven't found an opening. That's been frustrating at times, particularly when incidents that come up in the local community could be, in my estimation, better handled with a restorative approach.

A restorative response to the Veishea riot

Not a new problem, apparently. (ISU student paper, 1940s ed.)

I'll never forget the Sunday afternoon during high school I came back to Iowa from a youth retreat in Kansas, and my dad telling me one of my high school classmates had been murdered at a party during Iowa State University's annual celebration, Veisha. It set off the most intense week of my entire high school experience, where every day felt like living in slow motion. That was 17 years ago.

But for the past 30 years or so, ISU's Veisha celebration has had a bit of an identity problem. What started out as a celebration of education at ISU had turned into an excuse for people to come from across the state, crash in their friends'/siblings' dorm rooms or apartments, and get really, really drunk. Riots have occurred enough times at Veisha for them to no longer be a surprise. - So when I heard this morning that there was yet another riot last night at Veisha (I didn't even know it was going on), I thought "Hmm," and went back to sipping my coffee.

Tracking (nearly) vanished footprints: Christianity and radical democracy

This post is part of an ongoing series on the book Christianity, Democracy, and the Radical Ordinary, by Stanley Hauerwas and Romand Coles. This series is being authored by Jonathan McRay, Jonathan Swartz, and Brian Gumm. This post continues our reflections on ch. 2, a letter to Hauerwas from Coles. 

This wound is in me, as complex and deep in my flesh as blood and nerves. I have borne it all my life, with varying degrees of consciousness, but always carefully, always with the most delicate consideration for the pain I would feel if I were somehow forced to acknowledge it.

Wendell Berry, The Hidden Wound, (4)

In Romand Coles' "Letter of July 17, 2006" (Chapter 2) he suggests that "we care for the world as we care for the dead" (32) and that this gets straight to the heart of a radical-democratic relation to time. This responsibility to ancestors means that our focus of responsibility shifts from only being about saving the present-moving-to-the-future. We've got to do the slow work of sifting through the past, getting to know those who have walked before us, tracking those footprints that are still (but just barely) visible on the soil of this earth we all inhabit. We must do this because, as Coles suggests, "The disaster has already occurred" (33, emphasis in original).

That the disaster has already occurred suggests that this tracking of nearly vanished footprints will be work of the dirtiest, messiest and most lamentable sort. If the disaster has already occurred, then at least some of our tracking will put us on the trail of that disaster - and being on the trail might mean that we are actually led to the disaster. Tracking takes time, patience and an incredible attention to detail, all the more so when the sands that hold the footprints are shifting and the wind is howling and the rain is making it hard to see. I know I shouldn't have to write it but the fact that the work of uncovering these footprints is called "tracking" should help us to recognize that we most likely aren't going to find nearly vanished footprints in standard textbooks and public histories.

I opened this post with the quote from Wendell Berry because I think he suggests what might be involved in uncovering the wound of slavery and racism in America. In so far as I was born in this spot of land now referred to at the United States of America and was raised in it the quote could be mine, were I as eloquent as Berry. Yes, the wound is in me. It is not something external to me that I can merely look at from time to time and admire how well (or poorly) it is healing. And much like my children enjoy keeping their band-aids on as long as possible so as to avoid the pain of tearing it off so I, like Berry, am often hesitant to open the wound to the fresh air. But the fresh air is what the wound needs, it cannot be hidden forever to fester and become infected. Thankfully Berry continues thus:

But now I am increasingly aware of the opposite compulsion. I want to know, as fully and exactly as I can, what the wound is and how much I am suffering from it. And I want to be cured; I want to be free of the wound myself, and I do not want to pass it on to my children. Perhaps this is only wishful thinking; perhaps such a thing is not to be done by one man, or in one generation. Surely a man would have to be almost dangerously proud to think himself capable of it. And so maybe I am really saying only that I feel an obligation to make the attempt, and that I know if I fail to make at least the attempt I forfeit any right to hope that the world will become better than it is now.

Berry, The Hidden Wound, (4)

There is a vulnerability here that I think has resonance with the kind of radical-democratic practice that Coles is suggesting. It is the vulnerability of diagnosing disasters of the past (actually, maybe its letting others diagnose the disasters of the past), and the recognition of complicity in those very disasters. Its the vulnerability of refusing to cover over the past with immediate return to the present-moving-to-the-future. I suppose its the vulnerability of risking death, or at least the death of the story I used to tell about the past. I think it requires something akin to Rizpah's commitment to sit with the dead, for a whole blazing hot summer, (2 Samuel 21:1-14) in order to keep bodies safe from scavenging animals. But the kind of sitting still that Rizpah embodies I find to be extremely difficult if not impossible.

The anarchist genius of restorative justice?

Do "Grandpa" Zehr's lenses have an anarchist tint?
(Dr. Howard Zehr)

One of my abiding interests during and after my time studying at Eastern Mennonite University was the influence of Anabaptist-Mennonite thought and practice in the formation of the modern restorative justice movement, whose "grandfather," Howard Zehr, was my professor and mentor. (I wrote a paper about the subject, which was later published here.)

Howard has gone on record as saying his intellectual formation was influenced in part by the late Mennonite pacifist theologian, John Howard Yoder (to whom Howard was related; gotta love that Swiss-South German Mennonite gene pool!). And while I've never picked Howard's brain about the particulars of this influence, my imagination continues to look for hints and echoes of Yoder's thought in the vision for restorative justice that Howard taught me.

One thing I've picked out that Howard seems to have affirmed in my paper is the Anabaptist suspicion of the state, rooted in the early movement's historical experience of persecution in the 16th century at the hands of magisterial church-state arrangements. This suspicion of the state and its "wielding of the sword"/"carrying out justice" is one thing that  I argue influenced the formation of the restorative justice movement, and is a critique that remains implicit in restorative justice as I've received it. (More importantly and positively, I argued that it was the movement's ecclesial/social imagination that made it possible for Mennonites in Canada and the U.S. in the 1970s to come up with programs that would eventually get called "restorative justice.")

The drug felony as lynching

"Mulberry Tree"
by James~Quinn/Flickr

A black minister in Waterloo, Mississippi, quoted in Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow:

"Felony" is the new N-word. They don't have to call you a n----r anymore. They just say you're a felon... Once you have that felony stamp, your hope for employment, for any kind of integration into society, it begins to fade out. Today's lynching is a felony charge. Today's lynching is incarceration. Today's lynch mobs are professionals. They have a badge; they have a law degree. A felony is a modern way of saying, "I'm going to hang you up and burn you." Once you get that big F, you're on fire.

If felony drug convictions, mass incarceration, and permanent socioeconomic marginalization and stigmatization for black men is the new lynching, then the lynching tree has expanded into a life-long form of suffering, a "mark of Cain" as Alexander notes in The New Jim Crow.

Black liberation theologian James Cone ends his book The Cross and the Lynching Tree with this:

Every time a white mob lynched a black person, they lynched Jesus. The lynching tree is the cross in America. When American Christians realize that they can meet Jesus only in the crucified bodies in our midst, they will encounter the real scandal of the cross.

Meeting Jesus in the marginalized (and oppressed) is a biblical image from Jesus himself: "...just as you did it to one of the least of these..." (Mt. 25:31-46); so Cone's disturbing poetic work here is appropriate. The rest of that passage involves the sorting out of the sheep and the goats (all followers of Jesus, by the way; not the "saved" vs. the "lost"), so Christians should sit up and take serious notice of the ethical demands for faithful discipleship in this passage. But there's work to do before we can get there...

Restorative justice in a murder case

Conor McBride
(Photo by Ryan Pfluger/NYTimes)

There is an amazing story about restorative justice in a Florida murder case by Paul Tullis over at the NY Times. Read it. All of it. It's long but worthwhile:

Can Forgiveness Play a Role in Criminal Justice?

(See also an interview w/ the family on USA Today: Parents who forgave their daughter's killer: It 'frees us')

This story was all over my peacebuilding friends' Facebook timelines this morning because of the involvement of Sujatha Baliga, a restorative justice practitioner and advocate based in California, who has some connections to EMU's Center for Justice and Peacebuilding and my RJ mentor there, Howard Zehr.

The title of the article is somewhat of a misnomer to RJ practitioners, who are always quick to point out that restorative justice does not necessarily entail the practice of forgiveness. A better title for the RJ practitioner would have replaced "forgiveness" with "restorative justice." Even still, forgiveness - including Christian forgiveness on the part of the victim's parents - does play a crucial role in this story, so let me point out a few things I noticed about that, as well as some non-theological observations about this case.

P.S. to "A justice system at its best"

Photo by my mommy!
(Click for the whole gallery.)

In my part-time role as Web & Information Systems Coordinator for EMU's Center for Justice and Peacebuilding, hands-down one of my favorite parts of the job is being co-editor of the Peacebuilder Online blog. Over the past few days I've been working with a part-time CJP student in my home state of Iowa, who wrote up an excellent restorative justice story/case study about a vandalism incident in the mid-90s at a synagogue in Des Moines. Here's that:

A justice system at its best by Fred Van Liew

My p.s. has to do with the photographer credited on the piece: my mother, Diane Gumm! On any blog which I post or edit, I always try to use photography or images that I know are honoring copyright. So even though there were a few small images of the synagogue dug up by Google Images, I couldn't determine their copyright, and all the ones I found on Flickr didn't have open copyrights (I always search for Creative Commons-licensed photos).

[Cross-post]: Elicitive Pedagogy in the Digital Age

Mirrored digital Koru
(Adapated from J. Colman via Flickr)

One of the joys of being a tech and web nerd in my part-time job at the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding has been getting in on the planning and implementation of the first-ever online class offered by the center, which just started on the first of this month but has been a year in the making. So I just posted this piece over at the Peacebuilder Online blog, telling the story of how it all came together and the challenges we had to overcome...

Elicitive Pedagogy in the Digital Age

The ROI of RJ: Rehumanization

Photo by Jeff Frost via Flickr

In an impassioned op-ed piece over at NationofChange, Christopher Petrella paints a troubling picture of the state of corrections in the United States and the paths which brought us here. Particularly troubling is what Petrella calls "the circuitous pathways between race, citizenship, containment, and profitability."

Not only is the phenomenon of for-profit prisons becoming more common, in the midst of state budget crises across the nation, California is even suggesting that inmates pay for the services of the correctional facilities to which they're being sent. How inmates from predominantly impoverished backgrounds would actually be able to pay for those services (they couldn't) is part of the scheme. Even after leaving facilities, ex-offenders would then be financially indebted to the facilities, effectively shifting their "incarceration" to another form, economic. As Petrella point out, these people cease to be "criminals" in the eyes of the system and now become "consumers."

But it doesn't have to be this way. One of the most important aspects of restorative justice is its emphasis on rehumanization of all involved in instances of wrongdoing, criminal or otherwise. A privatized corrections system assumes an anthropology of literally captive consumers (structured economic individualism), whereas restorative justice assumes an anthropology of relationship and responsibility amidst community. Restorative approaches seek to heal the personal and social wounds done in instances of wrongdoing, whereas a privatized corrections approach seeks to extract capital to buoy the ailing state. Therefore, restorative justice  entails an implicit critique of systems such as privatized corrections but also the assumptions that underwrite such approaches at levels social, political, and economic.

So to use capitalist jargon, the "return on investment" of restorative justice is a return to pre-modern understandings of justice, rooted in embodied, accountable relational networks rather than abstract ideals and institutions. Such a return is well worth the investment.

Cross-post: Restorative Justice Revisits Punishment

One of my CJP professors, Barry Hart (left); Photo by Jon Styer

This past spring I prepared a conference paper on the restorative justice "creation story" and its stark contrast with the criminal justice system, and then did a little storytelling from Anabaptist history. That paper made its way onto this blog in: Yes and No to restorative justice as "a Mennonite Thing".

The editor of Peacebuilder Magazine, the biannual print publication of the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP), liked it well enough to run it as the opening article in the Spring-Summer 2011 issue, which - in my professional capacity - I just posted online yesterday. Here's the paper again in edited form...

Restorative Justice Revisits Punishment

My thanks go to the editor, Bonnie Price Lofton. The few times I've had my writing edited before release in whatever form, I've always been very grateful for the editor's impact on the piece. This article is no exception! So, thanks, Bonnie!

Another sad-shocking-powerful expression of costly grace

Chloe Weaver;
MWR file photo

A few months ago I theologized about a Mennonite family in Washington whose children were tragically killed in a car accident, and how the family's response was shocking to many, including the news journalist covering the story as it unfolded over years.

Last fall, 20 year-old, Chloe Weaver, met her tragic end while bicycling on a highway in Colorado, being struck from behind by a teenage boy driving a pickup truck who then fled the scene but was later identified and charged. Again, this Mennonite family's response is not typical by broadly American justice standards:

Weavers seek 'healing response' at sentencing - Sheldon C. Good, Mennonite Weekly Review

Yes and No to restorative justice as "a Mennonite Thing"

Today I had the privilege to run up to the D.C. area and back to give a quick talk on "Restorative Justice: Revisiting Punitive Interpretations of the Bible" at a conference called "Student Learning and Global Justice" co-sponsored by the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU) and the International Justice Mission (IJM). I shared a session with Dr. Ken Turner, a professor of the Bible at Bryan College, a Southern Baptist-affiliated school in Tennessee. Given that and the crowd was largely American Evangelical college students, it was a nice change of pace from the Anabaptist crowds I run in.

It was also fun to present the paper, because it's essentially making the case that the "creation story" of the restorative justice movement, which you can find in the paper embedded below, has some distinctly Mennonite-Anabaptist qualities to it. But I'm also careful not to say that restorative justice is "a Mennonite thing." The paper is a quick weaving of storytelling and history for restorative justice, the Western criminal justice system, and the Anabaptist movement as the back-story for RJ's "creation story."

The presentation followed Dr. Turner's discussion on slavery in the Bible and how we should work with it in our engagement with Scripture, as well as how we should think about issues of modern-day slavery, particularly sex trafficking. After my paper, we opened it up for another 20 minutes to discussion and Ken and I had a great time fielding questions together. Also, to the doctoral student with whom I talked afterward, I hope you check out some of the materials in my footnotes and bibliography!

Restorative or transformative theology?

Howard Zehr

For the past few years I've had the joy of assisting Howard Zehr in the administration of his restorative justice blog. As I mentioned in my very first post back in October 2009, the name of this blog - Restorative Theology - takes its cue from the field that Howard helped shape over 30 years ago, a field in which I've studied and done a small amount of work. So in addition to simply helping administer, I also look at Howard's blog as a conversation partner to this one.

Howard's posts tend to be be reflective inquiries into the state of restorative justice as it's presently understood and practiced. Perhaps the primary concern in his work at this stage of his career is helping practitioners in various arenas keep true to what he sees as the values and principles of restorative justice. He's just put up an interesting post with the following query:

Restorative or transformative justice?

Read on for some of the ways in which I think a theological conversation shifts the concerns underlying such a question. I'll also make a case for restorative, transformative, and theopolitical Christian practices...

No villain, no hero... Just faith

Periodically, stories arise from the Anabaptist traditions that shock and sometimes offend sensibilities of the broader society. Perhaps most prominent in recent American memory is the 2006 Amish school shooting at Nickel Mines, Pa., and that community's response of near-immediate loving outreach to the shooter's family. Another story that exhibits costly Christian grace comes from a Mennonite family from Chewala, Wa., whose five children were killed in a car accident five years ago. But the story doesn't end there as this piece from the local TV station details...

Grace in Grief: The Schrock Family, Five Years Later - KXLY.com

Children of the incarcerated: What will happen to them?

Kevin, photo by Howard Zehr

In 2007, when I was co-facilitating a writers' workshop in a women's correctional facility, one topic that consistently came up in writing and discussion with the group was the deep pain associated with the break-up of families. Many of the the women were mothers who had lost access to their own children because of drug or alcohol arrests and subsequent incarceration. I don't wish to ignore the wrong committed by these women, just as I don't wish to ignore the psychosocial realities which fostered an environment for their wrongdoing to take place. But even while keeping these things in view, it was impossible not to feel compassion as they shared through sobs and tears, their stories of love and loss.

A new book of photographs and stories, What Will Happen To Me?, co-authored by one of my mentors here at EMU, Howard Zehr, focuses the lens on the other side of these kinds of situations: on 30 children whose parents are incarcerated. The book is co-authored with Lorraine Stutzman Amstutz, a restorative justice practitioner and trainer working for Mennonite Central Committee/MCC in their Office of Crime and Justice.

Since 1 in 15 black children in the United States have a parent in prison, African American magazine, Ebony,  ran a story this week on the new book:

‘What Will Happen To Me?’: Restorative Justice Pioneer Takes Look At The Impact Of Parental Incarceration On Children In New Book
by Margena A. Christian
These move through society unnoticed. They harbor a secret they tell no one for a myriad of emotions consume them. Shame. Anger. Confusion. Isolation. They aren’t alone but one wouldn’t know it because people don’t like to discuss “the secret.”

As the article notes at the end, Howard was the first white student to attend Morehouse College, a traditionally black school in Atlanta. That a white Mennonite from Indiana did this at the height of the Civil Rights movement is still striking today. Howard once told me that his decision to attend Morehouse was partly influenced by John Howard Yoder, which I of course thought was totally awesome!

Justice on the healing edge

Earlier this year, my mentor & friend, Howard Zehr, told me about an organization that had reached out to him for help in their formation: the International Guild of Visual Peacemakers, whose website just went live last week. Howard guest-blogged one of their first posts on the site. He nicely describes his cross-disciplinary and arts-infused work in both fields of restorative justice and photography. This approach is one that I seek to embody in my work. Here's a snippet from his post:

Photography at the healing edge

One part of me is a photographer. I’ve worked internationally as an NGO photojournalist. I’ve done marketing and magazine stories. I love landscapes and portraiture (see www.howardzehr.com).  But what I like most is doing documentary work. In my experience, documentary photography can help bridge the chasms that separate people. If done respectfully and collaboratively, it can also provide a way for people to share of themselves. My vision, like that of the IGVP, is to use photography as a way to work on the healing edge.

The other passion, and much of my career, has been in the criminal justice field, and specifically a field that I helped found called restorative justice. Unlike criminal justice that tends to divide, restorative justice is essentially a peacemaking approach to justice. Restorative justice is justice on the healing edge. (emphasis mine)

See also Howard's Restorative Justice blog at Eastern Mennonite University's Center for Justice and Peacebuilding.

Looking back at A Season of Service

This post is a mix of housekeeping and navel-gazing. I'll get the latter out of the way first and move on to the former after the break. "A Season of Service" is a paper I wrote for my senior project to complete my BA in English at Simpson College in the fall of 2007. Creative nonfiction had been (and continues to be now) a literary genre that I enjoy very much, especially from folks like Jon Krakauer and Donald Miller. So I wrote this paper from my own experience facilitating a creative writers' workshop at a women's correctional facility in Des Moines, Iowa the summer prior. The experience of the workshop and the paper that was born out of it became life-changing events that would soon radically change the world within my family. In March of 2008, I was speaking with my co-facilitator and a workshop participant who had since been released from the facility at a restorative justice conference in Des Moines. Howard Zehr was the keynote speaker and someone I had never heard of. I've told this story many times in the two short years that have passed, so I'll go light on it here. Essentially: Howard Zehr radically altered my life and the life of my family. Of course, I qualify that with the years of discernment and spiritual growth that had preceded this moment of seeing Howard, but I'll let the statement stand.

A few months after finishing "A Season of Service," I posted it on my other website, Honnold.org, in serial fashion. About once a week, I would drop a section of the paper onto the site and let people comment on each. [Update: The original posting is no longer available on Honnold.org - BG, 1/16/2011] I'm reposting the entire story here on the Restorative Theology blog, all at once, for posterity and that it may be incorporated into this new-ish web project of mine, because it is a significant marker along the journey. It marks the end of the last chapter of my family's life together and the transition into this current chapter. The story itself is a reflective one, bouncing around over a few years in the midst of the primary timeline, the summer of 2007.

I've been posting long papers recently, and I assure this is the longest. But if you're interested, read on after the break for an important story from my not-so-distant past: A Season of Service...

Restorative Justice in Higher Education

This morning I have been involved at a technical-communications level for an event being held here on the campus of Eastern Mennonite University, the Symposium on Restorative Justice in Campus Conduct Administration. Held in the chapel at the seminary, I've been sitting behind the audio-visual equipment, flipping switches and turning dials to make sure presenters are heard, PowerPoint presentations are ready to go, and videotaping the various speakers. I've also been tweeting for the event like crazy on my iPod. All of this falls under the rubric of Marketing and Communications for the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding/CJP, so best of all...I'm getting paid to do all this fun stuff and listen to some excellent reflections on restorative justice in the arena of higher education! The event is, as the name implies, focused on student life/campus conduct issues in higher education, and has drawn four great scholar-practitioners who are all passionate about restorative justice.

So why blog about this event here? Well, the field of restorative justice, and its "grandfather," Howard Zehr (heavily involved in this event today, and the subsequent training), are a big part of why my family ended up moving to Virginia from our happy life in Iowa. So in the title of this blog, "Restorative Theology," there is a nod of respect and honor aimed at the field, and Howard's continuing mentoring influence on me, as I explore the intersections of theology and peacebuilding (within which restorative justice is included here at the CJP).

Another reason I make note of this here on the RT blog is the emerging sense that the arena of higher education might be a place where I continue to spend a decent chunk of my time, even beyond graduation from the CJP and Seminary in (hopefully) about two years. My spiritual-vocational discernment process has started to make a few things very clear to me over the past academic year, now nearing its end. The primary current emerging is that I love to teach, and I've been able to exercise that in a number of ways here on campus in this past year, both in my seminary internship and in my two professional roles on campus. So while I don't see myself working directly in the field of student life/campus conduct administration, which this RJ event is focused on, it very well could be an area I'm indirectly involved in down the road. I tend to be an integrative thinker and doer, so I'm keeping my eyes and ears open here at this event, with that internal processing and discernment going on.

Did I accomplish my goals?

About two weeks ago, with just over a week to go in my project for "Research as Art & Transformation," I had a quick discussion with my professor-adviser, Howard, and asked him for a bit of advice on how to finish out my project, which was still in fairly nebulous shape at that point. In Howard's office, unloading what I had learned so far but was still wondering how to put the finishing touches on, he sat and listened intently, as is his way. Howard's advice is always so simple and common-sense. In some ways, I think restorative justice, the field he helped envision and begin articulating is also a no-nonsense/back-to-basics/common-sense innovation (revolution?). But his advice here was just what I needed to hear: "go back to your initial project goals."

[slapping forehead]

This helped focus me in the final days and get the thing wrapped up and ready to go for the class presentation this past Tuesday in class. But I forgot to include any reflections on goals in my summary post. So here's a little postscript to tie the whole project in a bow, connecting it back to what I envisioned way back in September, which was distilled in this post from early Oct.: A (hopefully) modest proposal.

What I didn't list in that post, though, were these two goals I had for the project:

• To deepen my understanding of how theology and peacebuilding intersect and interact
• To facilitate a dialog along these same lines, hopefully building bridges in the process

So did I accomplish these goals with this class project? Read on after the break as I attempt to answer. A note on audience: I'm essentially writing this to anyone with familiarity with EMU and its Seminary and CJP, the two programs I'm studying in.

10 Ways to Live Restoratively

My professor, adviser, and friend, Howard Zehr, just posted something worth reading over at his Restorative Justice blog on the EMU site:

10 Ways to Live Restoratively

A few things jump out at me:

• Interconnection
• Awareness/Sensitivity
• Taking responsibility
• Respect
• Deep listening
• Compassion

Since encountering them, the values of restorative justice have resonated deeply with me. Obviously, the field they seek to sustain inspired the name of this blog, and at some point I would love to start articulating what I think the name of this blog actually means, and it will likely be adapted from material like this and given Christian theological language. Indeed, there is already a chapter in Howard's landmark book, Changing Lenses, that deals with biblical justice, as well as there being a book in the Little Books of Justice & Peacebuilding series called The Little Book of Biblical Justice. So I'm not treading on fresh ground here.